iStock/Thinkstock(HOUSTON) -- A 7-year-old boy in Texas helped free his mother after she was tied up and robbed in her house at gunpoint Sunday night, police said.

The 41-year-old mother, who asked to remain anonymous, told ABC News that she was putting her kids in the car when three men armed with handguns approached her in the driveway in Houston.

"I wanted to protect my children because they were so scared," the victim said, speaking through a translator.

One of the men pushed her inside of the house and forced her to cooperate by threatening to kill her oldest son, 7, and by throwing the youngest son, 2, inside the house, she said.

"Because I don't speak English, they took my oldest son so he could translate for me," the woman said. "My boy was scared. They told him they were going to kill him, but he just stopped crying so he could translate for me."

Once inside the house, the robbers tied the woman up but left the boys untied and forced all three to lie down on the kitchen floor, the victim said. One of the men hit her on the head four times with the back of the gun and she started to bleed, she said.

While the family was on the floor, the men ransacked the house and made threats to the woman, demanding to know the location of the safe, said Jodi Silva, spokesperson for the Houston Police Department.

"Once they located the safe they took the cash out of it and fled the scene," Silva said.

The three men left the house with the money from the safe and didn't take anything else, police said. Silva could not disclose to ABC News the exact amount taken from the house but Silva said it was "significant."